Wise words referred to me by Dan McCaffry, on the undermining of democracy by judicial inquiries.

"But, crucially, inquiries are now being given remits to look into the ‘morality’, ‘ethics’ or ‘culture’ of the media (and possibly finance, too). They are being asked to go beyond identifying what happened, even to go beyond recommending what can be learnt from the mistakes of the past. Inquiries are now being asked to do something politics has failed to do: determine what we want our banking system to be. This represents a failure of politics – and the preference for conferring authority on unelected judges rather than mediocre politicians is far more damaging than Libor-fixing or phone-hacking"

Judges will be found who will not feel inadequate to the past. Legislation may not leave them much choice. Parliament has thrust them into making political decisions, such as how to balance the help given to families with dependent adults, against the help given to those looking after accident victims.

And we need not look further than at the enthusiasm of some of our coroners to moralise about what polticians should be doing, based on their individual case conclusions.